Well, there's no engine feature specifically dedicated to things like weather. You can obtain the effect using the existing animation abilities (maybe terrain animations?), but you can't add an option to disable things that don't exist.

There is an option for animated water though. Maybe it's possible to define weather patterns in such a way that they only appear when water is also being animated.

Rodick wrote:Nice changes, is there way to add weather animations (rain, sun beams, etc), also some weather sound effects with birds in background or similar and when it is night owls sounds...

Dugi has introduced 'blood rain' to Legend of the Invincibles, so I guess it's possible to add regular rain, too. SXRPG has different background sounds for different areas of the maps, and although I think it's not very well done, you might find it interesting to look at.

Rodick wrote:Nice changes, is there way to add weather animations (rain, sun beams, etc), also some weather sound effects with birds in background or similar and when it is night owls sounds...

Dugi has introduced 'blood rain' to Legend of the Invincibles, so I guess it's possible to add regular rain, too. SXRPG has different background sounds for different areas of the maps, and although I think it's not very well done, you might find it interesting to look at.

Dugi also has normal rain in the last scenario of The Beatiful Child. Though both of these look a bit wonky sometimes IMO, especially at the edges of the map. I think that a better way to solve this would be to add a big overlay over the entire "gameboard" part of the screen, but I have no idea if that is doable, and if you have a part of the map that is underground/inside a building it wouldn't make much sense.
Dugi's method is probably currently the best way to do it.

Yeah, it's true that the current ways of implementing weather are suboptimal. An overlay (or filter?) applied to the whole map would be better. Of course that would require engine support, and would likely wait until OpenGL support is integrated so that hardware acceleration can be utilized.